Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

A Snarky but Serious Look at Pop Culture

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

by Leave a Comment

Bingo 7 (The Collection) for the diagonal L to R, top to bottom BINGO! I have had Bad Feminist on my physical TBR shelf for some time. I was motivated to read it for the Bingo square, but also because I’m writing a course syllabus for this fall in which I am considering including a section from Bad Feminist. I figure, if I’m going to teach it, I should know the whole thing for context. I have heard a lot about Roxane Gay as a […]

How gender screws with all of us

The Gender Games: the problem with men and women, from someone who has been both by Juno Dawson

by 1 Comment

Part memoir and part introduction to gender and trans issues, Dawson, a trans woman, strikes a balance between her personal experience with gender, both pre- and post-transition, and a wider discussion of how gender messes with all of us. Her main argument is that gender is a ridiculously narrow set of expectations that hurts everyone: cis and trans, binary and non, female and male, from before we are even born. As someone with only a surface understanding of gender theory, I liked how clearly she […]

I taught you better than to open doors you can’t close

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

by 2 Comments

Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is yet another great example of the kind of book I would have missed had I not started reading more speculative fiction and diversifying the voices in my library. That would have been a pity, because this complex, powerful novel may very well end up at the top of my 2019 favorites list. After Earth suffered an unnamed cataclysm 300 years ago, the remnants of humanity were crowded onto the spaceship Matilda and launched toward some long-forgotten destination. Humanity […]

We need books like this…..

by Leave a Comment

This is my Underrepresented category. You know of a minority, it is here. There are two dads in the doctor’s office. Jilly’s aunts are gay, and one is black (with two children from her previous marriage that she “called the biggest mistake of her life”). Gino speaks about the injustices surrounding the shootings of young black people. There is a black and deaf child. Jilly’s baby sister is deaf. The author, Alex Gino is non-gender conforming. You Don’t Know Everything, Jilly P!  is Gino’s sophomore […]

Teddy’s Favorite Toy might be a Surprise

by Leave a Comment

Teddy’s Favorite Toy by Christian Trimmer has one of my favorite things about a book: It did not get preachy over the fact that Teddy’s favorite toy is a doll (which is a cross between the Rugrat doll and Barbie). Nobody teases him. Nobody mentioned he is a boy. The story is: Teddy’s favorite toy is tossed out and how a real superhero finds it. Teddy has toys that are more traditionally considered “boy” toys and he has this traditionally considered “girl” toy. He has […]

Evolutionary Biology is on notice

by Leave a Comment

3.5 stars I like Cordelia Fine and her work. Part of that, I’m willing to admit, may be confirmation bias — she clearly identifies herself as a feminist and is very upfront that her work is reflective of that viewpoint. But I was also trained as a scientist, and from that perspective my position is that many of her critics and detractors (and I’ll note here that for brevity’s sake I’m not including in this category people who have fundamentally sexist views and who probably […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo